Quick-check delegate expectations for 1-3 day courses in further education and training

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Type of VET institute: Further education and training

Good practice title

Quick-check delegate expectations for 1-3 day courses

Baseline / problem

We do satisfaction surveys for all of our courses and trainings. Our results are mostly very good but we noticed that sometimes there was an unsatisfied delegate who chose to remain silent during the 1-3 day course and instead informed us of their opinion only after the fact. Of course, at this point there was not much we could do to change this. Most of the time the dissatisfaction seemed to be caused by our training not matching up to the delegates expectation in some way.

Good practice: (Measures, instruments, criteria, indicators)

We introduced a simple quick-check to trainings. It is a two-part process as follows:

At the beginning of the first day the trainer asks the delegates to briefly describe what their expectations for the training are. This is often done in conjunction with the presentations of the delegates. The expectations are written down on a flipchart or some other way so that everyone can see them at all times.

At the end of the course the trainer returns to the written down expectations and briefly discusses them with the delegates. Were all expectations met? If not, why?

This process helps the trainer and the delegates to make an informal contract of sorts at the beginning of the training: “these are the things we will be looking into”. After the training they assess how well the contract was fulfilled.

Problems and constraints encountered and solutions found:

It is possible to catch blatantly wrong expectations with this approach. The trainer might notice that one of the candidates has clearly misunderstood the content of the training. This is a chance to improve things though and can usually be left to the expertise of the trainer.

It is a quite fast approach but there is a risk of getting too long responses from delegates. In these cases, the trainer should just keep the discussion moving from one delegate to next at a brisk pace.